Sermon for New Year's Eve Matins

Sermon for New Year's Eve Matins

31 December 2006 at :00 am

A very happy Christmas to you all. I want, this morning, to
offer you just a few of my random reflections on the Christmas
story.

As well as being a Canon of Westminster I am the Rector of St
Margaret's Church, next door, and the Speaker's Chaplain. That
means that when Parliament is sitting I do spend a lot of time "
over the road" in Parliament: over and above saying the "Prayers
for the Parliament" at the start of the day's business. Now , of
course, it is easy to be cynical about politicians and to write
them all off. But I always leap to their defence and say
that there are very many honourable women and men who are there
because they want to make a contribution to society and we should
respect that, and in any case parliamentarians reflect the rest of
society so, of course there are some who are less than saints, just
as there are in your place of work. In one of his Christmas
writings the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, reminded
me that the three wise men who came to visit the child Jesus, whose
visit we shall recall at Epiphany, probably came from such a world.
It has been said that politics is the art of the possible and there
do have compromises and deals in such a world, unpleasant as that
may be. The presence of those Wise Men honouring the birth of
Christ firstly reminds us that there is a place for that world at
the Crib. Yes, the first visitors may have been from the fringes of
society - the shepherds who were regarded as outcasts because they
could not fulfil the Law's requirements, but the Christmas
tradition also honours the visit of the wily politicians, the Three
Wise Men from the world of political deals, mirrors, alliances; and
their arrival did cause monumental trouble as the fragile puppet
King Herod slaughtered the innocent children to protect his
precarious puppet regime. None of that is so very different from
the world we see in our Newspapers and on our Television screens -
the world into which our Lord and saviour chose to enter.

Another reflection has been that there is room in the story for
all ages. Yes, Mary was probably 14 years old at the most - some
say 12 or 13 - but there is also in the lead up to the Nativity
that older couple, Mary's cousin Elizabeth and her husband
Zechariah. They were old and past child-bearing. And they were, in
a way, a couple who, we might say, were disappointed with life -
they have no children. St Luke's language implies that they are
part of the anawim, the faithful remnant of God; they are
righteous people, but they are both elderly and Elizabeth, St Luke
goes on to tell us, is barren. For those who wish to have children
this might seem to be a hopeless situation but the history of the
Jewish people demonstrates that God's plans are not limited by
barrenness or old age - witness Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel( the mother
of Samson) and Hanna. St Luke puts John the Baptist's birth clearly
within this great tradition and so I join the young and the elderly
at the Crib, the hopeless and the hopeful.

A third reflection has been about those who are on their own and
for whom Christmas is a difficult time when all around everyone
else seems to be happy and with friends and family. Of course this
is not always the case and Christmas can be a difficult time for
families who come together with expectations that a prolonged
period of being together cannot always realise. There are, too,
those who have worked themselves to the bone to prepare for
christmas and perhaps have spent far too much on presents and
festivities and are worried about their debts and led to think
"Whatever is it all about?". For them, as for the politician Wise
men and the young girl Mary and the elderly couple, Elizabeth and
Zechariah, here is a chance stand at the crib to look for the
meaning to this festival.

One of the dangers in Christmas as we now celebrate it is that
it can become just a fairy-story. Our pretty cards, our glittering
Christmas trees and our sterilised cribs can hide the fact that it
is into precisely the world that we know that God comes at
Christmas & the God we worship is down to earth, if nothing
else. Christmas reminds us that God is involved in our life - not
in a remote, other-worldly way but, amazingly, by actually coming
to live among us. One of our Lord Jesus' titles is "Emmanuel" which
means "God with us". God, who loves us so much that he was prepared
to come among us, to take on all the limitations of our humanity,
to bring us back into the fold of His love. This is a God we can
trust, a God who clearly shows us what we could not otherwise have
known: that suffering is not His anger, it is not a sign that we
have no part in Him. On the contrary, we see that in His own
beloved Son, the sinless one, there is His overwhelming sharing in
our suffering, and that through Him it can be transformed, becoming
the means of fellowship with God.

T S Eliot said:

Endless invention, endless experiment
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness,
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence:
Knowledge of words and ignorance of THE WORD.

How true that is of our hyperactive, achieving Western Society.
A phrase that always jumps out of the OT & NT is the very
wonderful phrase - "God's faithful love" In this birth
Christians have seen the sign of God's continuing and faithful
love: in this child God reaches out to us to bring us back
to Him, and "love only love was His meaning."

The Christmas event is not some sort of idyllic scene that says,
"Come to Bethlehem, visit this stable of the nativity and find a
cosy, comfortable peace for a while." Our rather pretty,
tinsel-laden cribs hide the harsh reality of that birth away from
the security and comfort & the medical skills and machinery of
a modern-day maternity unit. Rather, the Son of God was born into
the harsh realities of poverty and homelessness. It is precisely
because of this that our Christmas can be joyful even in the midst
of a harsh and troubled world. There is room for all of us,
sophisticated movers and shakers, young and old, those on the
margins of society, the happy and the sad, everyone, at the Crib.
We cannot, nor should we try to forget the miseries of many people
in the world today. Our rejoicing at Christmas is not an escape
from the world into a make-believe world of religious splendour and
fancy parties. Rather, there can be a deep sense of joy that as we
face the realities of the world and the realities of our own lives
we find at the centre of our universe the principle of costly,
sacrificial love. As the NT writers put it, "God was in Christ
reconciling the world to Himself." The message of Christmas is that
God, in Christ, has taken humanity to Himself and so every woman,
man and child is infinitely loveable and precious in God's
eyes.

Jesus is the only person who has ever chosen where He was to be
born and we should see more than a certain significance in that. In
this birth at Bethlehem, we see not power, but costly, sacrificial
love; but a love that is open to all - saints and sinners, young
and old, men and women, rich and poor, the marginalized and
society's establishment.

Here is so much to be thankful for - and here we see the
beginnings of that glorious picture offered by Isaiah ( Ch
35.1ff,): "the desert shall rejoice and blossom, they shall see
the glory of the Lord, here is your God 'He will come and save you,
a highway shall be there and it shall be called the Holy Way ,
everlasting joy shall be upon (your ) heads; (you) shall obtain joy
and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away'"

No wonder then that I am bold enough to wish you a very happy
and blessed Christmas!